The Question of Original Sin in Hamlet

The idea that original sin is not only present in Hamlet but also heavy with moral and aesthetic meaning is relatively recent but also implicit at earlier stages of the critical tradition. In 1980, Alan Sinfield crucially drew attention to Hamlet’s “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (F 5.2.167–68) as the play’s Calvinist turning point, one which “we are slow to recognise because we have been taught a more amiable conception of the Christian God.”¹ Some few years later, Philip Edwards asserted the play’s “religious element” after the moral disenchantment of the “anti-Hamlet” school of the midcentury.² Although the anti-Hamlet critics had not grasped the pertinence of original sin to their own argument, in retrospect, their leveling of the moral distinctions between Hamlet and his adversaries is clearly in step with more recent original-sin readings, not to mention a longstanding “counter-enlightenment” project to rehabilitate original sin as a philosophical category.³ What Edwards and Sinfield reluctantly acknowledged is the virtually scandalous thought welcomed by Kierkegaard: that the conclusion of Hamlet is deliberately framed in religious categories and is incomprehensible without them. Kierkegaard imagines Hamlet shrinking back from his revenge in “religious doubt” or a religious horror at the depravity of human nature.⁴ By contrast, Sinfield’s Hamlet, like those Dutch and Huguenot Protestants who evolved a theory of resistance or “controlled revolt” from Calvin, “believes that providence wants Claudius removed and that he should do it.”⁵ Edwards, remarking the disinclination of the anti-Hamlet critics to endorse Hamlet’s sense of holy mission, concludes, “It is not faith we need to understand Hamlet but doubt about our own skepticism.”⁶ We might say that independently of its becoming an object of critical discussion, the meaning of original sin in Hamlet has been in question.

The theme of original sin was explicitly recognized in Donald V. Stump’s demonstration of how motifs of the Fall and Cain’s murder of Abel in chapters 3 and 4 of Genesis join in a coherent thematic symbolism.⁷ The result is a leveling reading: Hamlet’s disastrous impatience with Providence shows that he “is doomed to become like Cain.”⁸ Catherine Belsey teases out further links between the Fall story and that of Cain in the context of Elizabethan family values.⁹ Heather Hirschfeld reads the architecture of the Fall in terms of the logic of trauma: “It is this type of deferred or belated recognition that underwrites the sustained allusions throughout Hamlet to the early chapters of Genesis.”¹⁰ The play presents us with “a narrative of repeated and deferred recognitions,” the effect of which is to capture Hamlet’s project within a compulsive rehearsal of sin’s traumatic origin. This logic extends to the supposed metanoia of Act 5, which is no “providential sea change.”¹¹ Hirschfeld’s is the most comprehensive original-sin reading of Hamlet that we have and, to my mind, the most thoughtful. Insofar as it sees Hamlet’s awareness of original sin condemning him to repetition, it too is a leveling reading. Two further leveling studies are worthy of mention. John Alvis comes at the play from the republican angle of Machiavelli’s commentary on Livy, wanting to know why Hamlet can’t dispose of the tyrant cleanly. To Alvis’s chagrin, the answer is that Hamlet is disabled by his original-sin fixation.¹² Finally, Vladimir Brljak reads Hamlet’s excuse to Laertes in Act 5 for killing Polonius (“That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house / And hurt my brother” [Q2 5.2.190–91]) as a reference to a late medieval legend derived from an obscure utterance in Genesis 4 by Lamech (an impious descendant of Cain whose inadvertent killing of Cain brings God’s curse upon him).¹³ Again, the consequence for Hamlet—whose traditional name “Amleth” is an anagram of “Lameth,” a common form of “Lamech”—is a leveling of moral distinction. Of all these original-sin-focused studies, only Belsey’s is not a leveling...